Hello, Vermont music fans! It’s been more than three years since my last Soundbites column, and I’m happy to be back. Current music editor Chris Farnsworth asked me to fill in this week while he delved into the comics world, his unofficial other beat (see “Treasures Told“).
I thought it sounded like fun — especially when he told me that Portland, Ore., “little orchestra” Pink Martini were headed toward Vermont this week. The band celebrates its 30th anniversary this year with a massive global tour that includes stops at venues such as Boston Symphony Hall, New York City’s Kennedy Center, the Lebanon Opera House on Sunday, October 20, and the Flynn in Burlington on Monday, October 21 — their 77th and 78th shows of 2024. (Browsing the current and past dates on Pink Martini’s website, I realized this band basically never stops touring.)
Pink Martini and I go way back. The genre-hopping, nostalgia-inducing, old-school-pop band dropped its first album, Sympathique, in 1997 during my first year of high school. I’d wager I was the only 14-year-old boy in my class who preferred the group’s luxurious strains of jazz-inflected, midcentury lounge-pop to … whatever the other boys were listening to. Maybe Guns N’ Roses?
I’m not sure how the disc made its way into my top-loading CD player. Maybe my music-nut older brother brought it home. However it got there, it fit snugly alongside my compilations of James Bond themes, Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, Frank Sinatra, and the classic Broadway soundtracks I was listening to at the time. (I didn’t discover trip-hop until the following year.)
Suffice it to say, it made my inner teenager’s day last week when I hopped on a call with Pink Martini’s lead vocalist, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist China Forbes.
Referring to Pink Martini’s evolution over the past 30 years, Forbes said, “It’s turned into this thing of its own.” Founded by bandleader Thomas Lauderdale, the group arrived during the height of what’s sometimes referred to as the ’90s cocktail revival, an unofficial reaction to ’90s alternative music (i.e., grunge). Bands like Combustible Edison, Squirrel Nut Zippers and Pink Martini reintroduced listeners to a breezy, swingin’ style that harked back to a time of sharp edges, big bands and highball glasses.
But, Forbes said, “that whole kind of kitschy cocktail thing doesn’t really feel part of it anymore, even though it started that way.”
The band has continuously expanded its sound, reaching into practically every corner of the world for inspiration. Across seven studio albums, Forbes, satellite band member Storm Large and special guest vocalists such as National Public Radio journalist Ari Shapiro sing pop songs in more than a dozen languages. The group also performs nuanced takes on traditional tunes including “Ov Sirun Sirun,” an Armenian folk song that Shapiro sings on 2016’s Je dis oui!
Pink Martini’s latest release, a two-track single featuring the laugh-inducing “I Told Ya I Love Ya, Now Get Out!” has legendary 93-year-old screen actress Mamie Van Doren on vocals.
“We are long overdue for another Pink Martini album,” Forbes noted. Since Je dis oui!, the band has released a 20th-anniversary edition of Sympathique, a compilation featuring the group’s French-language songs, plus two EPs as a backing band for singers Edna Vazquez and Jimmie Herrod.
It may have been a minute for Pink Martini, but Forbes released her own album in 2024. Smooth and contemplative, The Road is her first solo record since 2008.
Of all Pink Martini’s recent releases, Forbes said, a pair of peak-pandemic singles “herald the next album.” Forbes and Lauderdale cowrote both cheery tunes — 2020’s “The Lemonade Song” and “Let’s Be Friends” — along with songwriter Jim Bianco.
Not since the gap between Sympathique and its follow-up, 2004’s Hang On Little Tomato, has Pink Martini’s output been, ahem, so dry.
Let’s just say the first record wasn’t an instant smash.
“It was the kind of thing where we did the first record, [and] no one was paying attention,” Forbes recalled. The album was largely created to showcase the live act.
But relative obscurity didn’t last long. Sympathique‘s title track, a Forbes-Lauderdale original, went viral in France. Its smoky charm and insouciant undertones struck a chord, and the song was even adopted by striking French workers because of its lyrics (“Je ne veux pas travailler” translates to “I don’t want to work”).
“Then people were waiting for the second album,” Forbes continued. “It’s, you know, that sophomore curse. It’s kind of paralyzing. You want to follow it up with something better. We tried this and that, and one producer and a different producer, and it just dragged on and on.”
Hang On Little Tomato‘s bluesy title cut — also by Forbes and Lauderdale — marked the beginning of the band’s stylistic outgrowth. The album led to a prolific string of releases with increasingly more original material, not to mention collaborative albums with artists such as Japanese singer Saori Yuki and fellow Portland (and Vermont-connected) folk group the von Trapps.
I asked Forbes what it’s like, as a legacy act, to perform songs that might feel like they came from another lifetime.
“I love those songs, and it would be really weird to do a show and not do them. It’s unavoidable,” she said. But over the years, she’s developed the ability to “make things feel fresh every time,” whether it’s her banter or vocal inflection. “I need to feel like I’ve never said it before, and I try to sing the songs like I’ve not sung them before,” she explained. “So it doesn’t feel like a burden or tedious or anything like that to me. It feels good to perform the songs people want to hear.”
Not wanting to waste the opportunity to pick Forbes’ brain about some fun stuff, I asked her which venue, of all the global ones in which she and the band have performed, people need to see the most. Her reply: Royal Albert Hall in London. (It just happens to be my favorite venue, too.)
“It’s huge and cozy, I guess because it’s circular — the wrapping around, the balconies,” she recalled of the five or so times Pink Martini performed there.
For the local shows, we can expect something of a retrospective — though Forbes said she’s not quite sure what Lauderdale has in store.
“I never really see the set list until the day of the show,” Forbes said. “Sometimes, like, right as I’m going onstage.”
This article appears in Oct 16-22, 2024.
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